Fabulous Wigs: Richard II and Sophie's Rumba

I recently saw David Tennant in Richard II at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. There was
so much that was wonderful about the production. Tennant’s performance as
Richard II was perfectly pitched; the role he created here was streets ahead of
his Hamlet. The set, with its projections of architectural shapes onto screens
made up of fine threads, was subtly communicative of the instability of the
state and the king’s power, while at the same time illustrating its
magnificence. The production was well paced, and the wigs! The wigs were
utterly magnificent – a technical and aesthetic triumph! But wigs aside, I didn’t
feel I could sit down and write a wholly adulatory review of this Richard II; something wasn’t quite
right.

Last night on Strictly Come Dancing Brendan Cole and Sophie
Ellis-Bextor performed a rumba. The dance was beautiful, precise, moving, and
impressive in its level of difficulty. However, the judges did not like it. The
dance was deemed not raunchy enough, and the couple were slated for a lack of
connection. I couldn’t believe my ears! The dance had depicted a sensitive story
about love. Just because it wasn’t a dance about sex, the judges were unable to
understand. This TV moment brought to my mind all the problems I had found in
the RSC production of Richard II starring David Tennant. I am not drawing a parallel
here between Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s beautiful rumba hair and David Tennant’s
fabulous wig. Oh no! I am talking about a seeming inability to recognise any
form of love other than sexual love.

Stay with me here. I’ll go back to the beginning. Tennant
appeared as Richard II dressed in a flowing auburn wig, nail polish, and rather
beautiful, long robes. He acted as a petulant child, a child preening and
prancing, and acting the role of king. At the opening of the play he was
gloriously uninterested in the honour of his nobles, making their posturing seem
like a playground game casting himself as playground arbiter. Another
ingredient to this performance, heralded in advance by the nail polish, was the
element of camp and effeminacy that Tennant brought to his physical and verbal
characterisation. Thirdly, the production made the interpretation that Richard’s
relationship with his advisors and various other characters was homosexual in
nature.

The interpretation that Shakespeare’s Richard II was what we
would now call homosexual is one that can be backed up by textual evidence. In
III.I Bolingbroke accuses Bushy and Green (the king’s former advisors), “You
have in manner with your sinful hours / Made a divorce betwixt his queen and
him, / Broke the possession of a royal bed / And stain'd the beauty of a fair
queen's cheeks / With tears drawn from her eyes by your foul wrongs.” This has
lead many productions to depict Richard II throughout as a man driven by his
desires for other men, kissing and fondling them, whilst ignoring the business
of state. Productions often contrast this with a macho Bolingbroke, a man who
is a bit rough around the edges, but the stereotype of a man’s man. We should
not forget that Bolingbroke’s accusation also has a political implication: the Queen
signifies a powerful alliance with her family and as such should not be
neglected or mistreated. We are not only talking about the sexual here. To
concentrate on an interpretation of Richard’s sexuality is quite a reductive
reading of the play. Richard II is a bad king because he listens to bad
council, because he over-taxes his people, because he does not respect the
rights of his nobles, and because, as we see in the dramatized incident at the
beginning of the play, he does not respect their honour. Like a child he treats
their honour, warfare, and money as if it were a game. What’s more, at times,
he treats his kingship as if it were a game. Tennant brought out the childish
side of this monarch well, at one point, falling to the floor in a sulk,
pulling of his crown in despair, until one of his men gently replaced his crown
and wiped away his tears, as if he were a beloved toddler.

As I have said, the childish wasn’t the only, or even the
dominant, strand in Tennant’s characterisation of the role. The main impression
of this king, was that he dressed like a woman (hair, nail polish, clothing)
and that his relationship with the other young men on the stage seemed to be
primarily sexual. In contrast, we were given the butch Bolingbroke, rough, and
crude, and huge. The reasons why Richard II is a bad king were clouded, and the
message became he is a bad king because he is homosexual and not a ‘real man’
like Bolingbroke. The production made homosexuality analogous with effeminacy,
weakness and bad kingship. Surely in the 21st Century these things
are non-sequiturs. I for one can imagine a figure like Eddie Izzard playing an
effective and ruthless monarch while clad in mascara and a suspender belt. Easy
isn’t it. The analogy made in this production between homosexuality, effeminacy,
and ineffectuality was lazy, outmoded, and homophobic.

What was stunning about Tennant’s performance (in a good
way) was that he made the question of kingship a difficult one. Usually when
watching or reading Richard II, and I
include the Hollow Crown film production
in this criticism, I think it is quite easy to decide that kingship is not
inherent and that Richard is weak and has to go. No questions asked. It is hard
for a 21st Century audience to imagine the conflict a subject might
have felt about deposing a king. It is impossible to imagine what we might have
feared for our immortal souls when considering removing a monarch anointed by
god. Tennant gave us a sense of this conflict. At times he was a child,
snivelling on the floor, but just when I had made up my mind that kingship was
not inherent, that he had no nobility, he was rise up in a magnificent display
of power. When Tennant’s Richard II appeared in III.III with the words “We are
amazed; and thus long have we stood / To watch the fearful bending of thy knee,
/ Because we thought ourself thy lawful king: / And if we be, how dare thy
joints forget / To pay their awful duty to our presence?” he spoke them with a
terrible magnificence and power. He did not seem like a man on his way out,
deluded that he was still in power, he seemed like a king. There was an aura
around Tennant, there was something innate to the sovereignty of this Richard
II, and the audience was privy to something of the dreadful conflict inherent
in deposing a rightful king.

A friend who had also seen the production disagreed with me.
She felt that the homosexual love that the production had created, for example,
between Aumerle and Richard (Richard kissed Aumerle during this production) was
integral to the success of the production, and that this had created a tension
for Aumerle, and other characters, between their love for Richard and what they
thought the right course of action was for themselves and for the country. My
answer to this was yes they loved him. But can we understand no other form of
love than the overtly sexual? Love and loyalty to the sovereign was powerful
thing in the early modern imagination, the relationship between the king and
his subject was thought to be analogous to that between God and his church,
between a father and his child. The bond was sacred and profound. This particular
type of love, that for an anointed sovereign whom we believe is appointed by
God to govern our lives, is alien to us now. We only have a figurehead
monarchy, and do not believe that some are born greater than others, or to rule
others. Surely though, we understand loyalty, and we are capable of
understanding, more types of love than the merely sexual. This production of Richard II was brilliant in many ways.
Tennant’s performance was powerful and intelligent, he was in turns childish
and magnificent. His performance and the production as whole conducted a
complex discussion of the subtleties of kingship and love and loyalty. Why then
did this production fall back on old stereotypes? I think for the answer we
have to look beyond the RSC, and even the judges on Strictly Come Dancing, and
ask whether we as a society are able to understand love beyond the sexual.